finding bottlenecks on ubuntu systems

[Joseph Salisbury]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Mark van Harmelen
<markvanharmelen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> I've never done this before so all hints would be gratefully received.
>
> We are running a 9.04 server, with a single unthreaded process that is of
> interest, basically one that is busy transforming the contents of a mysql
> db. I want to find out if we can improve the performance of this process.
>
> Seems potential limitations are
>
> - limited by CPU speed
> - limited by access to mysql data on disc
> - limited by memory size, and therefore spending its time paging
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has any great commands  and/or command options for
> me to start my investigations with, please.

If you haven't already, install the sysstat package:

sudo apt-get install sysstat

This will give you some tools to gather performance statistics.  To
start you need to identify where the bottleneck is.  Use cpustat to
see if you are cpu bound, iostat to see if you are disk bound, vmstat
for pageing / memory stats, etc.

For more detailed analysis, you can install and use profiling tools
such as oprofile or systemtap.

>
> Or any strategies, words of advice, or (instructional) sources that you
> found useful in tuning your own systems.

This can be an open ended question when it comes to performance
tuning.  The very simple answer is find your bottleneck and fix it.
There will always be a bottleneck and it will always move to another
resource once you fix it.  The goal is to have your cpu become the
bottleneck(Then continue to tune your application).

It is best to try and tune your application first to use the available
resource most efficiently.  Don't just add more memory because your
swapping.  First identify why the process is consuming so much memory
in the first place.

Hope this helps,

Joe

>
> thanks
> mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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